The Three Trout of the Loue

In May 1873 the French Assembly voted that Courbet should personally pay for re-erecting the Vendôme Column, the Napoleonic monument that had been pulled down two years earlier during the Paris Commune. In July he crossed into Switzerland, and he never came back. The Loue is the river that runs below Ornans, the Jura town he was born in, and in these years he painted its trout over and over, laid out large and seen from close up. This canvas went to the Kunstmuseum Bern, which took it off the wall for a full conservation campaign between 2019 and 2021.